Tightening the Valve? —

EA, Ubisoft agree to share downloadable libraries

When it comes to purchasing downloadable PC games, there's Steam and there's everyone else. Today, major changes happened in that "everyone else" part of that equation, though probably not large enough shifts to make Valve nervous just yet.

The biggest news is that Ubisoft has opened up its UPlay service (yes, the same one that has encountered so manyDRMproblems in the past) to third-party publishers for the first time. The service will now also distribute games from companies including Electronic Arts, Warner Bros., Bohemia Interactive, Telltale Games, Robot Entertainment, and many more. The company is celebrating this new expansion by offering a free game download to anyone who purchases a game costing $19.90 or more.

EA, for its part, has accepted Ubisoft games such as Assassin's Creed III and Farcry 3 onto its Origin service for the first time. This isn't such a massive event considering EA has been offering third-party games on Origin since late 2011, but it's still an important expansion for the service.

Ubisoft and EA each sharing their downloadable PC libraries represents a sort of detente in the battle for the estimated 30 percent of the downloadable games market Steam has left on the table. But it doesn't quite go far enough to really shake things up. Maybe if Ubisoft and EA had seen fit to merge their online stores into one mega-service, they could possibly make a play to attract the kind of exclusive and desirable content they'd need to seriously compete. One potential sticking point that could be holding up that kind of a merger: while EA is well known for withholding high-profile games like Mass Effect 3, Battlefield 3, and Crysis 3 from Steam, Ubisoft seems to have no such reservations about putting all of its titles on Valve's service.

As it stands, the non-Steam PC downloads market will continue to be hopelessly fragmented. This isn't only between UPlay and Origin, but also between largely indistinguishable players like GamersGate, GameFly, Amazon, and GameStop (which purchased Stardock's Impulse in 2011 to gain an immediate foothold in downloadable games). All these services offer slightly different libraries and features, but separately none of them really provide any compelling differences from Steam's market leading, de facto standard. It's simply not enough to grab much of a market.

While services like GOG and Desura have carved out niches of their own by focusing on DRM-free classic and indie games, respectively, these other services are left fighting amongst themselves to see which one can out-Steam Steam itself. Banding together and presenting a unified front seems to be the best chance all of these digital storefronts have, but territorialism and inertia will likely prevent that from happening. Then again, if Ubisoft and EA can learn to share, as they have shown today, maybe there's some hope for change after all.

Promoted Comments

That´s like reading "The plague and cholera will join forces to make the world a happier place"......

313 posts | registered Jun 17, 2009

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl

148 Reader Comments

They could merge into the most comprehensive library built upon magic fairy dust and unicorn horns and it would still suffer the fatal flaw of being run by two companies no one trusts. Why can't these dumbasses understand that half of what makes Steam so successful is the level of trust and support they have with the community?

Great news.... the two companies I actively avoid buying products from are going to share with each other!!! I will file this under the category "If a tree falls in the forest..." and move on with the rest of my day.

Fine by me. If all the would-be's can learn to cooperate in a pro-consumer fashion, so much the better for everyone. While there's Steam and everyone trying to be a distant #2, that's the enthusiast market. Improvements for the typical consumers would be great.

I mean, just for an example; last year I found out Amazon wouldn't let me gift someone a digital game. Really? Wow... There's definitely room for improvement, and the higher the standard all the companies are forced to stick to in order to competitive, the better

It's not the libraries that are the important thing. This isn't like consoles, where there's a material investment in maintaining access to two libraries - I can have Steam, Origin, UPlay, GfWL all running on my PC at the same time.

It's about what goes along with the service that's the key point. I don't want Ubi's software running on my machine; I don't have any particular reason to trust it. Ditto Origin.

Usually I'm strongly in favor of competition as it lowers prices for consumers. However, Steam is constantly having sales anywhere from 50% to 80% off on games. All this fragmentation does is piss me off because now I have Steam, Origin, uplay, etc running on my computer using up resources and making it harder and more annoying for me to know where to go to get a game.

Usually I'm strongly in favor of competition as it lowers prices for consumers. However, Steam is constantly having sales anywhere from 50% to 80% off on games. All this fragmentation does is piss me off because now I have Steam, Origin, uplay, etc running on my computer using up resources and making it harder and more annoying for me to know where to go to get a game.

Just put everything on Steam and be done with it!

Not to mention Origin's sales / pricing are a joke. Can't imagine Ubi's will be any different. If they pull their products off Steam it would be bad for consumers. Steam is a service people love because the price point hits with everyone at some point.

BTW am I nuts, but who is buying Assassin's Creed 3 and Sim City for $80?!?!?!!?!?!?!!?

Oh, and more, good competition. I love Steam/Valve now, but Gabe could have a heart attack, with lesser leadership changing the company to something more unpleasant in a few years. Gotta have competition... You can't trust any company to remain the same year after year, decade after decade.

They could merge into the most comprehensive library built upon magic fairy dust and unicorn horns and it would still suffer the fatal flaw of being run by two companies no one trusts. Why can't these dumbasses understand that half of what makes Steam so successful is the level of trust and support they have with the community?

Here's an example of why I'll always support Steam over anything else. I only have a Mac, but I like to play old school Windows games in a VM. I use Steam so that I can manage my game library on my Windows VM. I purchased a number of old games a while back like Star Wars Jedi Knight 2/JA and the original Half Life. Recently, I started up Steam on my Mac and noted that a number of formerly Windows only games are now available to download and play on my Mac. It is wonderful having a Mac version of these games for no additional cost. I just can't imagine that level of service from EA or Ubisoft.

Doesn't EA and Ubisoft only offer the ability to download and install your games for a limited time, or have they changed that now? I purchased Battlefield 2142 from EA's download service and was -really- pissed (should have read more carefully) that after something like 6 or 9 months I would no longer be able to download it from their servers. After losing the game with a new system, I cursed them and never looked back.

I mean, just for an example; last year I found out Amazon wouldn't let me gift someone a digital game. Really? Wow...

That's pretty bad.

Yep. I talked to customer service, and emailed them politely about it. I cited examples of other services, my gift buying habit, how I felt it would be ideal for them to add since a lot of non-gamers shop Amazon, etc. Will it get implemented because of my letter? Probably not. But, its hopefully one more letter/request among many, and eventually they'll get their digital service to a more competitive level. If that happens? Fantastic!

I eagerly await the day someone invents the decentralized app store.I get why EA and Ubisoft doesn't want to put their games on Steam and thereby feed their competitor. But making another appstore just like it is only helping EA and Ubisoft, while making the lives of consumers harder. A better solution would be if the three could agree to a common framework where their App stores could coexist, sort of an App Mall.A single sign in, search across all stores, a choice of clients. Add a store by clicking a link.

Usually I'm strongly in favor of competition as it lowers prices for consumers. However, Steam is constantly having sales anywhere from 50% to 80% off on games. All this fragmentation does is piss me off because now I have Steam, Origin, uplay, etc running on my computer using up resources and making it harder and more annoying for me to know where to go to get a game.

Just put everything on Steam and be done with it!

Not to mention Origin's sales / pricing are a joke. Can't imagine Ubi's will be any different. If they pull their products off Steam it would be bad for consumers. Steam is a service people love because the price point hits with everyone at some point.

BTW am I nuts, but who is buying Assassin's Creed 3 and Sim City for $80?!?!?!!?!?!?!!?

Is that what they're expecting for Sim City? Because I've budgeted $60

I eagerly await the day someone invents the decentralized app store.I get why EA and Ubisoft doesn't want to put their games on Steam and thereby feed their competitor. But making another appstore just like it is only helping EA and Ubisoft, while making the lives of consumers harder. A better solution would be if the three could agree to a common framework where their App stores could coexist, sort of an App Mall.A single sign in, search across all stores, a choice of clients. Add a store by clicking a link.

Considering that Valve almost never makes games anyway - that already exists - it's called Steam.

While there is nothing on PC's that restrict game libraries, and thus, I can use Steam, Origin, Impulse, etc, the majority of my collection is on Steam, and I have no real incentive to move away from that. I have invested in Steam, because they were first, true, but just like most Apple users aren't going to jump to Android (because they lose their apps), and Android users won't jump to Apple, I continue to use Steam, because I can't move my games out of it. If I want to play those games, I have to use Steam, because that's where I bought them.

On the surface, if the publishers were to withhold their games from Steam, it might seem like users would start to use their services. But then the games won't sell as much, because you're starting with a MUCH smaller userbase. So you have to put the games on Steam to hit that 70% of the market... but then users don't have incentive to switch.

There is some hope for the publishers, though. Unlike mobile phones and consoles, these are divisional game libraries within the platform. There is no concrete reason why Steam would be dominant, other than the fact that users seem to generally prefer it.

They could merge into the most comprehensive library built upon magic fairy dust and unicorn horns and it would still suffer the fatal flaw of being run by two companies no one trusts. Why can't these dumbasses understand that half of what makes Steam so successful is the level of trust and support they have with the community?

That.

Of course people in charge there are MBA/marketing/sales type cutthroats. They make decisions based on things such as sales numbers and size of downloadable library and number of customers and so on.

Like many such people whose customer base is highly technical, they do not understand their core customer. We want convenience. We want reliability. Ease of use. We want to want to trust them with our logins and with our content and with the CC numbers. Finally, we want reliable software coded by good devs following best practices. Not some shitware coded by inexperienced people in a dev sweatshop.

I'd rather that it's be GOG in that case, since they're no DRM. But, if they had Steam levels of success/market, there's no guarantee they'd remain awesome.

Personally, I prefer multiple stores, since someone is always having something on sale. I only wish multiplayer and stuff was always distribution-platform agnostic, though. The only thing i dislike about Steam is Steamworks - its great and all, but I'm more worried about it lessening competition than anything else. Unless, of course, other distributors "get over it" and sell games regardless of it (MW2 wasn't sold on some services because of it). Just accept everyone's bits and go with it.

Pity Wardell sold Impulse - he had some interesting, platform agnostic ideas...

Great news.... the two companies I actively avoid buying products from are going to share with each other!!! I will file this under the category "If a tree falls in the forest..." and move on with the rest of my day.

I really really want to play Far Cry 3. It's a great game.

But I can't install crap on my computer. I just can't. I'd rather skip a great game, than subject myself to the frustrations, and subject my computer to shitware DRM and content delivery system.

I eagerly await the day someone invents the decentralized app store.I get why EA and Ubisoft doesn't want to put their games on Steam and thereby feed their competitor. But making another appstore just like it is only helping EA and Ubisoft, while making the lives of consumers harder. A better solution would be if the three could agree to a common framework where their App stores could coexist, sort of an App Mall.A single sign in, search across all stores, a choice of clients. Add a store by clicking a link.

Considering that Valve almost never makes games anyway - that already exists - it's called Steam.

Except that they don't offer any customer service when things go wrong and their app makes iTunes look stable.

In the 9 years I've had a Steam account, I can count the number of times I'd had to contact customer support on one finger. And in the case it was about (buying a game's addon and then finding out it had third-party DRM even though the base game didn't) they offered to refund me the entire purchase and remove it from my account.

Eraserhead wrote:

ardent wrote:

I await word of their withdrawal from Steam, followed shortly by their exit from existence.

Origin's crappiness is part of what drove me to stop playing the handful of EA games I had to begin with.

Convenience uber alles, guys. Uber alles.

I would have thought it was trivial to make a client better than Steam.

Steam isn't the best client, but it certainly isn't the worst either. Although they could really stand to build a better interface around their Chromium Embedded browser.

Sounds like Steam's client and CS has done YMMV, but my overall experience has been top notch, and I've never had to contact customer service. The only area of improvement is its easier to reinstall all my stuff via Windows 8's marketplace than Steam or any other service, and that's something I could see them working on.

The only reaction that UPlay and Origin being friends should elicit from Valve is laughter. They are both awful services and pose no real "threat" to Steam. I'm not sure if there's even a reason for multiple game distribution services, but if there is, Origin and UPlay aren't in the running.

Any service which doesn't allow multiple computers to be logged in (even if not playing games) simultaneously is annoying.I should be able to have more than one PC being able to download updates/etc without having to keep being logged in and out of multiple services when I have more than one gaming PC.

Usually I'm strongly in favor of competition as it lowers prices for consumers. However, Steam is constantly having sales anywhere from 50% to 80% off on games. All this fragmentation does is piss me off because now I have Steam, Origin, uplay, etc running on my computer using up resources and making it harder and more annoying for me to know where to go to get a game.

Just put everything on Steam and be done with it!

Not to mention Origin's sales / pricing are a joke. Can't imagine Ubi's will be any different. If they pull their products off Steam it would be bad for consumers. Steam is a service people love because the price point hits with everyone at some point.

BTW am I nuts, but who is buying Assassin's Creed 3 and Sim City for $80?!?!?!!?!?!?!!?

Is that what they're expecting for Sim City? Because I've budgeted $60

Given its limited area to build upon, constant online access, and an inability to raze my city to the ground and simply boot up an older save...I budgeted nothing for it.

On a sidenote, I am running really low on publishers to inherently trust to do right by the gamers.

Origin is/was horrible. I do not want to be able to have more games on a horrible platform.

Both these companies can dies a death of immolation imo. Until they put their games on Steam, with no DRM (I believe Ubisoft has now) then they will never get another cent from me. I'm so mad that EA ruined Bioware, one of my favorite studios. Haven't bought an EA game since ME2.

Now Ubisoft on the other hand is doing the right thing. Selling games in their own store, selling games on Steam, selling games on other downloadable platforms and ugh they are gonna do Origin now.

Steam uses DRM and can potentially kill your account, and I don't like that at all. However, there are many upsides to Steam (both as a service and pricing) that it outweighs the downsides and I'm overall happy with it. With Origin, etc ... not only do you have the DRM downsides, you hardly have upsides either!

I mean, just for an example; last year I found out Amazon wouldn't let me gift someone a digital game. Really? Wow... There's definitely room for improvement, and the higher the standard all the companies are forced to stick to in order to competitive, the better

Amazon doesn't really have a PC digital distribution service. Sure, they will let you download an installer, but mostly they just sell Steam/MMO keys. It takes a lot more than just file downloads to be competitive with Steam/XBLive/PSN/etc.

To be honest, it doesn't make sense to buy Telltale Games's games from anywhere other than directly from TTG itself. When you buy directly from TTG, you get the game as it comes out, with minimal DRM*, which is the case with every other distribution channel, BUT, when the season is over and done with, they put it all together on a DVD, DRM-free, with a bunch of goodies, and offer it to those who bought the full season for the price of shipping (~$4 USD), or, in the case of a special edition, the difference between the SE and the full season plus shipping.

* If I remember correctly, they use SecuROM, but none of the nasty bits; they only seem to use it to define whether or not the game has been activated, which you do by logging into the game (once) with your TTG username and password or, as with the older games (pre-Puzzle Agent 2), an activation key.

Except that they don't offer any customer service when things go wrong and their app makes iTunes look stable....

They certainly don't do that anymore. That's basically perfect service....

It might be that the other game apps are even worse, but it is still a pretty dire app given what it does. And its no more stable than when it first came out....

So you've no idea what their customer service is like.

It sounds like Steam shot your dog, but your experiences are not typical.

I had great customer service last year when I accidentally bought one game out of a bundle instead of the bundle itself (looked at details on one game, clicked link for the one game). My mistake, but no problem getting a refund.

I also have not had any problems using the client over several years on 3 different PCs.

I haven't bought any EA/Origin games yet. Put them on Steam and maybe EA will get my money.